Tlönista

I took today off work, at the doctor’s suggestion. She said I could take as much as a week off for sick leave without needing a doctor’s note, but I’d feel bad about taking more time off after spending the week before Easter on holiday.

It was wonderful getting to see Ben again. We were holed up for a week in a poky little room in Harlesden. The price shocked me but he assured me it had been the cheapest option. We went and saw touristy things and hung around the West End and Bankside, but also wandered into the Inns of Court, the Docklands and Spitalfields, and picnicked on my own One Tree Hill. We were going to have high tea in Kensington, too, but just ended up in a pub with pie and beer.

After that real life crashed back in. I had to finish up my job on the side transcribing lectures for a law student, and go back to my full-time work, and catch up with friends, and it was just like before. I feel a bit bad about it, but I really do have an entire separate life here.

I was tapering off the venlafaxine, too, taking a lower dose. The symptoms – dizziness, trembling, and nausea if I didn’t take the pill soon enough – faded after a week and things seemed to be going all right, but then this week all of a sudden depression returned with a vengeance. Feeling weepy, feeling foggy, feeling as if everything in my life was insupportable, on the verge of quitting my job, breaking up with Ben [note: not actually breaking up with Ben], moving out of here. Well, I did give notice to the landlady and started looking up rooms to rent on Gumtree, but everything else seemed much more tolerable in the With me my mood drops in the afternoon and by nighttime I’m damn near non-functional. The doctor said most depressed people are the opposite, go figure.

And then everything did go really wrong. My computer refuses to work – it doesn’t recognise that the adapter’s plugged in, even after resetting the PMU a lot – and we still don’t have Internet and the isolation is maddening. And being depressed I kept picking at myself about Ben and why couldn’t I be monogamous, like a good girlfriend would. And in my distraught state everything at work was driving me crazy and two days in a row I snapped at two different co-workers over things that I just would have kept inside normally. And then I got my one month’s notice at work – the housing market is crashing badly and one solicitor had been let go already, so I’d known for a while my days were numbered, but this was just bad timing, really.

Anyway, on Friday I went home in tears and by the time I got back I was as low as I’d ever been. Pulled myself together, took a bath, and went over to drink wine and eat ice cream and tell bad jokes with L., and resolved to put everything out of my mind this weekend. On Saturday went to Dr. Sketchy’s and had dinner with K., and on Sunday went to see an apartment in Bow, a lazy afternoon soaking up the sun in the East End, and got laundry done. But when the sun set the gloom set in and I felt that if I had to go to work tomorrow morning and go back to face everyone, after they’d no doubt been talking about me all weekend about my bizarre behaviour and how impolite and unprofessional I had been, I would honestly rather jump in front of the fast train. The goddamn phone booking system at the practice wasn’t working, and I’d been trying to get an appointment all weekend. I called NHS Direct and they put me through to an out-of-hours doctor service thing and they contacted the practice overnight, but luckily I could get an appointment first thing that morning. And then right before bed Ben phoned and I sat out front between the curtained living-room windows and the hedge (to get a little privacy, and the door to the garden was locked) and we talked and I felt so much less isolated.

I felt better after talking to the doctor, who said that I shouldn’t be tapering off at such a difficult time, and got a new prescription and took the day off. There’s no quick fixes for stuff like this, but I need a quick fix because so much is happening and I can’t be out of my mind during it!

I think I will go to one of the parks and walk around, and then get some errands done and hopefully find an Internet café and post this. Just so you know, I probably won’t have Internet at home till I find a new place, at the end of April, and will be making do with going on at work and the odd café on the weekends. I am regularly Twittering from my mobile, and the best way to get in touch with me directly is to go on Twitter and direct message me by prefacing your message with “d tlonista”, e. g., “d tlonista Lose the game”, because I receive those as SMSs. The second-best way is email. Too busy to spend time on Facebook, although I do keep up with your blogs. Oh! Also added the latest roll to Flickr.

Now off to Get Shit Done…

Well, That Was Anticlimactic

I have to go back and get a fasting blood sugar test done next week. I also got a new venlafaxine prescription, just as my last allotment is running out. A month’s worth of medication is £6.85. If I have more than one prescription, the doctor told me, I can pay a lump sum of £90 for the entire year.* Counselling** runs on a sliding scale and is surprisingly cheap: £10 per session, maybe, a fraction of what it cost back home. And contraception, which cost $7 a month back home, is free.

It’s also easier to get an appointment here, compared to the chronically overcrowded university health clinic. So far I’ve been able to get an appointment within the next week, twice, without any fuss.

All of this comes with simply living here.

I will inevitably grow disenchanted with the NHS, but right now, this seems like a damn good place to be.

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* According to a 2006 Consumer Reports comparison of antidepressants, my current dosage of generic happy would cost me approximately $232 USD per month out-of-pocket. From one of those sketchy online marts peddling cheap Canadian drugs, about $60 CAD per month.

** Hey! You got your medication in my therapy! You got your therapy in my medication! Two great tastes that taste great together.

The health-care assistant dips a piece of litmus paper into the vial of urine, draws it out, and compares the colours to a chart. Glancing up at me abruptly: “Do you have diabetes?”

“Er…no. I don’t think so.” Shouldn’t she be the one giving the answers?

“When did you last eat?”

“Two-ish, maybe?” It’s evening now.

She frowns at the bit of paper again. “Wash your hands.” When I’ve done so she pricks my finger and draws the little drop into a digital thingamabob. The number means nothing to me, but it puzzles her: “Well, blood sugar’s fine.” She tells me to make a doctor’s appointment.

The discrepancy is probably nothing, but alarming nevertheless. Yes, I know that diabetes has gone from an early death sentence to a common, serious but manageable medical condition. But it’s an annoyance. And I like my sweets, damn it all.

I’ll make an appointment tomorrow, before they need me too much at work.

P. S. I discovered, rather too late, that the Angoulême comics festival is coming up in only three weeks’ time. Getting travel and accommodation together in time is a bit of a gamble and I will probably end up just attending next year’s.

P. P. S. Must go, cat wants love.